Also, have you checked for conflicting directives in httpd.conf and all its include files. Remember the last overriding directive (and more specific directives) encountered wins the game and gets used.

The directives that accept filenames as arguments must use Windows
filenames instead of Unix ones. However, because Apache may interpret
backslashes as an "escape character" sequence, you should consistently
use forward slashes in path names, not backslashes. Drive letters can
be used; if omitted, the drive of the SystemRoot directive (or -d
command line option) becomes the default.